With Mobile Express you can access your Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 data wherever and whenever you need it! Follow the simple instructions below to get started with Mobile Express today.  

As a sales professional, here are 25 reasons why I love working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (and why you should love it too)! Dynamics CRM automates every aspect of my job, making it easy to find and sort through information that I need...

With so many technology consulting firms to choose from, it is often difficult for decision-makers to sort through the options and offerings and determine the best partner for their organization. Over the past 15 years in the IT industry and business applications realm, I've noticed some key traits that set top consulting firms apart. I hope my insights will help you make the right decision for your organization.

We use dashboards very heavily internally and have recently expanded our set of core metrics and KPIs to be about 12-15 charts and graphs (depending on special events we may have, etc.). In this post I will tell you about a fairly quick way to create rotating dashboards with SharePoint. SharePoint is the perfect solution for our needs because it allows us to stay within our core systems and leverage the platform.

While many people have enjoyed the “You Might be a Redneck If” jokes by Jeff Foxworthy, few people are aware of the applicability to the IT community. As a professional IT consultant for C5 Insight, I have saved a number of clients from unfortunate situations caused by their previous, not-so-qualified consulting partners.

In a few days, Microsoft will be hosting their annual event focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM—Microsoft Convergence 2013. This is a valuable event for organizations that are either using or are considering Microsoft CRM. Read on for more reasons on why you should attend Convergence.

Successful user adoption, or the mental acceptance and use of something new, can be achieved in any organization. There are a number of methods that can be used to implement new systems, including "big bang" (single rollout) or "phased adoption" (gradual rollout). Regardless of the method you use to rollout user adoption in your organization, there are a few important items that must be factored into your plan.

I often find myself talking to a frustrated prospect who has just endured a disastrous implementation, and often he or she is looking to me to save them from their current partner/vendor. Coming into these situations, it seems there is an expectation that I will ride in on my white horse, rescue them and we will gallop off into the sunset with all of their IT problems behind us. If only it were that easy.

There isn’t a day that goes by, where I come across some type of challenge, situation, issue, or piece of new learning that isn’t worth sharing with others. This article encourages you to blog, explains why it's important, and provides ideas on how to make it a natural part of your day.

Receiving a Request for Proposal  (RFP) or Request for Quotation (RFQ) is generally thought of the same way as a dental appointment — a dreaded but necessary activity. As a result, most sales professionals maintain the belief that it's OK to slap a response onto a couple pages in response to the RFP because they have such a great bond with the prospect. I don't agree with this mindset and I'd suggest those professionals should consider a more systematic approach.
 

Earlier this week it was announced than an international hacker had successfully made off with over 3 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers from the state of South Carolina.  State and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars trying to secure their data systems.  In spite of this investment, a hacker was able to identify and exploit a weak spot in their armor.  As public sector budgets are continuing to shrink, there is pressure to add more software applications to automate tasks and lower costs; increasing pressure to cut costs on security for these applications; and increasing pressure to extend the life of less secure and aging legacy computer applications.  The result is that our government agencies are at increasing risk of successful cyber-terrorism through a greater number of applications, lower security standards, and aging applications that should be replaced.

How could South Carolina and other state and local governments cost-effectively protect vital citizen, business and government records?  The answer comes from an emerging private-sector technology: cloud computing.

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

Many companies spend a lot of money, time and effort to build a data warehouse and OLAP cubes, however they start using them to build the same old 2D reports that they were used to from the past. The standard 2D canned reports (Rows and Columns) can be built from any conventional relational database by writing some standard SQL queries. So why use an OLAP (On Line Analytic Processing) cube for such reports?

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM , Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains.

Business Intelligence reporting includes the usage of "dimensions." To put it simply, a dimension is a way that you want to "slice" your metrics. For example, you may have a metric of revenue that you want to track. You may want to track this for dimensions such as product (i.e. provide a report of revenue by product), by territory, or by time. The time dimension is one of the most often requested dimensions for business intelligence reporting - but it can also be one of the most complex to implement. This post takes a look at how to create an effective time dimension for your BI project.

SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now.  Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM).  Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance?  Simple.  Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business.  Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.